Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
yield a high proportion of lean meat. With the increase of urban population and the in-
crease in standards of living however, there is an increasing demand for a leaner type
of pig.
Sixty years later the same dietary preferences linger on: building workers still breakfast
in 'greasy spoons', while food outlets for office workers offer a more 'Mediterranean' fare
with delicacies such as ciabattas, pastrami and sun dried tomatoes. Nonetheless the sophist-
icated urban consumer who declines gobbets of streaky bacon, and bread fried in sausage
grease, may still be absorbing a fair amount of better disguised vegetable oil.
Up until about 1948, in the UK and other northern countries, most fat was of animal ori-
gin - margarine was largely made of animal fat, including whale blubber, and you would
be hard pushed to find a bottle of vegetable oil in what (because it was where the bacon
was hung) used to be called the larder. This was because until well into the 19th century
countries north of the Alps didn't produce any vegetable oil to speak of, and olive oil was
the only edible vegetable oil available - at a price. There is a biological explanation for
this. Animals grow a layer of fat to keep warm, whereas plants contain oil to stop their
seeds drying out; therefore animal fats are found mostly in cold climates, while vegetable
oils are abundant in warm climates. There are exceptions such as linseed and rapeseed, but
until recently these were regarded as inedible and used only for industrial purposes. In the
north, animal fats are local foods - the rise of vegetable oil is a symptom of globalization.
The first edible vegetable oil to reach the market in the US, at the end of the 19th century,
was 'Cottolene', a blend of cotton seed oil (a byproduct of the cotton industry) with a
proportion of beef dripping. Food writer Alice Ross observes that it was one of the first
branded and advertised commodities, and was marketed to upwardly mobile urban con-
sumers who were encouraged to view pork as 'a less expensive meat … associated with
“the poorer classes”'.
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Since the 1950s, other vegetable oil products have followed the same promotional path
as Cottolene, and largely replaced animal fats in margarine, in soap and as a cooking me-
dium. A few of these - grape seed oil for example, or corn oil which constitutes only 4
per cent of wet-milled corn - are commercially viable because, like Cottolene, they are
byproducts of another industry. Others such as palm oil and ground nut oil are competit-
ive, at least in part because they are farmed in developing countries with cheap labour. In
the 1970s, Canadian researchers bred a variety of rapeseed low in indigestible erucic acid,
with the result that rape oil came to the table. It is now the third most common vegetable
oil after soya and palm oil, and the only vegetable oil produced on a large scale in the UK.
Whilst these vegetable oils have outcompeted pig fat both financially and culturally, it
remains unclear whether their ecological performance - in terms of land requirements or
pollutant emissions for example - is better or worse than traditional pig fat production. The
Tanganyika groundnut scheme of the late 1940s quickly established itself as the archetypal
